I received some excellent Twitter advice from Rob Quigley of the Statesman in Austin, TX. I wanted to put it here for posterity and because it’s so damn awesome.

Ok, I will be the first to admit it – I used Twitterfeed for @theindependent’s stream when I first started it several months ago. Yes, the line to beat me over the head with a rubber chicken forms on the left. I did it because I knew I was the only person in the newsroom who even knew what Twitter was, and I wanted it to appear fresh and updated regularly, and my main thought was that our Twitter feed could be used (at least to start) for people who wanted to get our headlines on their cell phone.

See, we had been looking for a third-party vendor to deliver headlines to cell phones but money, as always, was an issue. Twitter was free, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. I did receive some feedback from readers who seemed amazed that a small paper like ours would be using a ‘Web 2.0′ (their phrase, not mine) tool like Twitter and they were glad we did. So I thought, “Yay, success!”

In my defense, I did occasionally send out manual tweets, soliciting tips, or pointing out something the paper was trying to pimp. But for the most part, yes, we were Twitterfeed-heavy.

A couple days ago, after bemoaning the fact that my newsroom is… difficult, I got a dm from the aforementioned Mr. Quigley, and I’m eternally grateful that this bloke is alive because I wish to bow down before him and kiss his toes. He told me he could help and then proceeded to send me a long and fascinating – and somewhat scary – email full of ways I can improve @theindependent’s stream.

Let me preface this by saying that I used this post by @ericasmith as an example in my Big Meeting with the newsroom. In it, she touts the wild success of the Statesman’s offshoot Twitter stream they set up in advance of Hurricane Ike. So I was excited to hear from him later that night when I was all down in the dumps about the meeting.

So, the advice: He told me to shut off Twitterfeed.

…

Uhhh, okay. Scary! I put up  a sort of half-hearted defense of keeping it – but maybe dialing it down. But deep down, I knew he was right. He said his success with @statesman is that he does it himself, and gives it a personal “voice.” Keeping it casual as if tweeting cool links to your friends. The more I thought about it, the more excited I became about giving this a try.

You can read the full email of advice he sent me here on his blog.

So I tried out every bit of advice he gave yesterday. What were the results? As of right now, I’ve gotten 9 new followers and 2 of them sent me direct messages. One offered a cool feature story idea, and the other told me he was a Nebraska storm chaser and offered to share his pics and video with us. How cool is that?

Here’s what I did, according to Quigely’s advice:

I tweeted a brief message saying the Indy’s tweets were going to be a bit different. I started by offering up a bit of weather. Then I started going through our headlines and tweeting ones I thought were “worthy.” I made my tweets sound pretty much like I sound when I tweet on my personal Twitter accounts.

I did a search on ‘Nebraska’ (I actually have been doing this since the beginning – every couple of weeks or so because I know a lot of people don’t even realize we Twitter. If they see us following them, chances are, they’ll follow back) and followed new people I found. I discovered that several Nebby tweeters had blocked us. At first I was strangely hurt by this until I realized that I bet they blocked us because when I followed them before, they looked and saw that our feed was pretty much just automated. Maybe they figured we were spammers or something. Otherwise, why would you block a newspaper from following you?

Anyway, for each new follower yesterday I sent them a ‘thank you’ dm, and for the rest of the day, I tweeted everything from newsroom chatter (we’ve had quite a big story brewing here for a few days) to headline updates and I tweeted in my ‘voice.’ Casual, but not too casual, and I made sure to answer every @reply and dm.

You know what? It was a lot of fun :) It’s not terribly time-consuming since you don’t want to over-tweet. You just blast out a tweet when something happens or there’s an interesting update, or even something you want to direct people towards.

As far as converting my newsroom, I’m going to step back from that. Ease up on the nagging. I think the best approach is a stealthy one. I was just talking to one of the reporters and mentioned some chatter I heard on Twitter. I passed along the info about the follower who offered up their storm video. Every now and then I’ll mention our competition’s tweets (nothing like a bit of competitiveness between news outlets to strike up interest.) But I’m not going to insist that anyone tweet. I figure they’ll come around when they’re good and ready to come around.

Thanks Rob Quigley for your wonderful advice.

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